Readings

A reunion of people who worked on System R and its
derivatives, including SQL/DS, DB2, and R*, was held at
Asilomar on May 29, 1995. This is an edited transcript of
the day's discussions, incorporating changes provided by
the speakers. It provides an informal but first-hand account
of the birth of SQL, the history of System R, and the origins
of a number of other relational systems inside and outside
IBM.

Erlang was designed for writing concurrent programs that "run
forever." Erlang uses concurrent processes to structure the program.
These processes have no shared memory and communicate by
asynchronous message passing. Erlang processes are lightweight
and belong to the language, not the operating system. Erlang has
mechanisms to allow programs to change code "on the fly" so that
programs can evolve and change as they run. These mechanisms
simplify the construction of software for implementing non-stop
systems.
This paper describes the history of Erlang. Material for the paper
comes from a number of different sources. These include personal
recollections, discussions with colleagues, old newspaper
articles and scanned copies of Erlang manuals, photos and computer
listings and articles posted to Usenet mailing lists.

Over twenty thirty years ago, the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) set about on
an epic journey with the launch of a mammoth effort to automate their 170+ medical centers.
They chose the ANSI MUMPS computer language as their foundation and erected a framework to
support their applications. Originally called DHCP, VISTA is well suited for use outside
of the DVA and healthcare, a very well kept secret indeed.